Have scholars finally deciphered Linear Elamite?
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-deci...
>As far as my co-authors and I are aware, our ZA paper—which underwent a double-blind peer review—has only received positive reactions. Moreover, the incontrovertible facts and solid arguments presented in support of the decipherment are such that I would not expect there to be much disagreement about our conclusions
> That said, the article in question has only just appeared and begun circulating in the scholarly community. It is too soon for it to have generated the kind of scholarly debate Lawler suggests it has.
I would have assumed that prominent, respected researchers in a field would hold off judgement and getting quotes in media until they had at least had the chance to read the freaking paper. Or at least qualify their statements as such. But nope, I sure was naïve to think so.
Chinese writing is a syllabary with redundancy (many ways to write the same syllable) and complicated spelling rules. Chinese developed from logograms, as did Phoenician and cuneiform, but that was left behind thousands of years ago.
Oddly, Chinese students are often taught to call the glyphs logograms, which they happily parrot, despite that they do not use them in that way. Many earnestly believe that users of other Chinese languages, when writing Mandarin, are simply transcribing what they say ("with different pronunciation") and not, as they are in fact, translating to a language as different from their own as German differs from English.
And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs represent the same syllable, and one is preferred for writing this word, and another for that word. So there is an appealing "just so" story to be told for those.
But they are exceptional, and often ad hoc, drifting in and out of fashion.
Chinese languages use about 1200 different syllables (some, a fair few more, e.g. with an extra tone). There is very strong pressure for any new word to be shortened to one syllable so it can be written with one glyph, in a process a little like acronyms become words in English. (E.g. laser, sonar.) This makes for a phenomenally huge overload of homophones. Having different glyphs for the same syllable helps disambiguate when writing. And, people naturally like to try to make things more mnemonic. (You must sometimes pretend to write a glyph on your hand, when talking, to to make sure you are understood, in a technical or legal context.)
But glyphs for syllables, pronunciations of words, and preferred synonyms drift as in all languages. Meanwhile syllables for glyphs change on a completely different schedule. So whatever correspondence maybe once existed, there is very little of it left.
Many Chinese people like to think they can read things written two thousand years ago, because the glyphs are often hardly changed, but they must confabulate because so much else has changed. The huge number of homophones mean you can invent a plausible meaning for practically any sequence of glyphs.
The numbers are instructive. Mandarin has tens of thousands of words, mostly of one syllable, but only ~1200 syllables. Most people can read several thousand glyphs, but write from memory rather fewer. So even if a glyph "should" be used for a word, you might not remember how to write it, and must write one that sounds the same, instead. Imagine this drifting over centuries as different glyphs come in and out of fashion.
Despite all this, even small children have no difficulty understanding and expressing these languages. The fluid meanings make for glorious wordplay like we can never experience.
The Linear Elamite script has already seen claims of decipherment. But most of it was just circular conjectures. Due to the small corpus, progress is slow and claims rest on little evidence. Desset did contribute a lot to what little is accepted today. Still evaluating the new publication of Desset et al. If it turns out to be solid, we'll include the new sound values they propose.
Desset is not the main contributor, but one among equals.
You might want to avoid making the same mistake the Smithsonian journalist did.
One of the theories behind the Indus Valley Civilization, is that they spoke a Dravidian language, related to modern southern India's Dravidian languages.
There are also some theories (not generally agreed on), that the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian languages.
People also have hypothesized that the IVC script may have at least some relation to Linear Elamite, and if so, it's more of a basis to do generate some hypotheses.
My hope is that deciphering the Indus Valley civilization will allow us to extract a more ancient form of this religion from comparing the two.
BTW, "IVC" is problematic, because it extended hundreds of km east well across the subcontinent. The Hindi majority in that part of its range would prefer it not.
1) Nothing says they can’t have had a similar religion (at least the early YHWH cultists) where there’s many gods but one overarching force. But also
2. YHWH is not a member of that pantheistic hierarchy. He is a foreign god theorized to have been imported by a merchant class. It is YHWH worship I find connections with not (necessarily) the ancient Levantine religion.
Anyway it’s not my approach, just a playful intuition.
After the Temple was razed c.70 CE, none of the rituals could be worked anymore, anyhow.
Not many people have connected Cernunnos to the same culture as the above entities. It is evidently quite certain when looking at the art of these cultures that there is a common thread and history. I think there may be oversight into that aspect compared to the writing and language. The way something is crafted is quite unique and the signatures are there tying the above together.
Indus Valley <> Viking <> Babylon <> Gaelic <> Irish/Scottish <> Vedic <> Abrahamic
These are connections that are quite curious indeed.
I’ve brought these things up and usually I just get assaulted as a conspiracy theorist or wanting to rewrite history.
All history is fiction anyway.
The only thing I care about is patterns and patterns have signatures, and to me, there’s a common threading of a specific signature that suggests a significant population and culture of same origin that doesn’t align with the reasoning that exists to explain otherwise disconnected cultures.
Thanks.
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It is likely there was an enormous corpus of Harappan literature on media that turned to dust without having being transcribed. Very likely, the oldest Harappan settlements are now deep underwater, offshore of India and Pakistan, inundated by meltwater from ice-age glaciers.
People insisting the Vedas came from the Harappans completely neglect that the Vedas are fundamentally martial, while the Harappans had nothing at all like an army. There is plenty of evidence of Harappan violence -- mostly blunt-force trauma -- but by context it more resembles banditry, civil strife, mob violence, or feuding, anyway without any hint of soldiery.
Which would also fit in with why Jews and Christians were discriminated against: being monotheists isn't conducive to unity across an empire if you have one group of people claiming their god is the real one and all the others are not only fake, but it's actually a sin to believe in them
Then when the emperor wants to solidify his power, he replaces local kings with his own people, and identifies himself with a chief god.
Akhenaten, Tut's father, tried it in Egypt, with Aten as big cheese god. It didn't work out (probably) because the priesthood turned out still too powerful.
But that goal probably is a big part of why Rome went Christian.
The article exaggerates how unique a syllabary is. The writing system of Akkad and Babylon was almost entirely syllabic, and grew in parallel with Sumerian:
Still, one syllabary had to be first.
Logograms evaporate when you want to write foreign names and words.
This is entirely unsupported by evidence. There are a varieties of approaches to writing systems around the world - syllabaries are only one.
> Japan to Ireland
Japan, yes. Ireland, no - there is no record of a syllabary in use there.
And, it is attractive to think there was a first, although it is easy to imagine a pair of neighboring scripts both evolving to syllabaries simultaneously.
No, they had a relatively standardized syllabary embedded in hundreds of other signs which were used throughout the centuries. Only in contexts outside of Akkadia (Hittite, late Elamite) were the reduced syllabaries used in almost pure form. Dessets argument is that Linear Elamite went through such a reduction first.
It's like saying Egyptian was the first alphabet, whereas similarly to the situation above they had a relatively standardized abjad embedded in hundreds of other signs. It's a bit opposite to English where we have a standardized alphabet extended through myriads of special signs.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/za-2022-0003/...
I considered investing the $30 but was advised against "feeding the dragon"
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=desset+elamite
Very fascinating and probably sound.